UIT 8: In this weeks episode I start a series on using Sketch to build and maintain efficient and scalable design documents.

Overview

• Share with the audience why the absence.
• Cover important aspects of symbols in Sketch.
• Talk about the future content in this series.

Symbols

Symbols, when used properly, help to vastly speed up your workflow by giving you ways to save and reuse common elements across your designs and design systems. They also form the foundation of Sketch libraries (I will cover this in a future episode of this series).

When you make changes to a Symbol, those changes appear everywhere you use it in your designs. One of the major added benefits of symbols is overrides, which allow you to change specific parts of individual Symbols, without altering the underlying symbol itself.

I cover these symbol subtopics in this episode:

• Organise with good naming conventions
• Nest symbols, and treat them akin to an atomic symbol
• Name the layers inside the symbol with generic names
• Create atom variations at equal sizes
• Learn how to pin the layers that make up your symbols for correct resizing

Pinning

Before you create a symbol, make sure you spend the minute or so necessary to correctly pin, or anchor, all the elements that make up your component. It makes for drastically simpler and less pain when you eventually find you need to resize them. It’s essential practice for things like forms and buttons. Once you understand the benefits you’ll start setting it on everything!

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/8

Links

• Great Ormond Street Hospital
• Sketch
• Sketch: Symbols
• Sketch: Smart Layout
• Sketch: Resizing
• Sketch: Fix Size
• Sketch: Pin to Edge

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UIT 7: In this weeks episode I share five fundamental tips aimed at developers who want to build their design skills and design appreciation.

Think and plan
As a developer, you wouldn't start building an app or Website without some planning! It's the same for design. Give it the time it deserves.

Establish requirements...

So before jumping straight to the code, establish a plan. I'd suggest downloading and printing out some gridded PDFs, but using sticky notes, a whiteboard, or sketching in a notepad are all great options. Don't skip this step even if you think you have all the details in your head. When you finalize your wireframes, review it and you will probably notice you are missing something.

Develop a solid understanding of UX principles
One of the most important tips I can give is to get a decent understanding of user experience design. If you can always design with the user in mind, and not your own personal preference (because you aren't usually the target audience) then the slightly less important user interface design will be able to absorb some perhaps more quirky design choices. This might seem like common sense, but I've worked with many CEOs, product owners, project managers and developers who don't appreciate the value of good UX, and it shows.

There are a series of ‘laws' associated with UX design, and I'd recommend digesting these over time. Pick one a day and keep it in your mind throughout your work day.

'Laws of UX' defines twenty laws, with a few examples being:

• Aesthetic Usability Effect: Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.
• Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
• Law of Proximity: Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
• Law of Similarity: The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.

Use a colour palette
Unless you've studied colour theory, colour harmony doesn't come naturally to most of us. And trying to come up with colour combinations that complement one another during the design process can be a real bottleneck to beautiful aesthetics or at least seriously slow down the process whilst you try to work out if this colours works here and there... As a solid starting point for a new project I'd suggest a tool like Coolors, and check their Trending palettes... which gives you seemingly endless options.

Over time, you'll develop your own preferences and learn to recognise which colours complement each other, but this is a great starting point...

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/7

Links

• Laws of UX
• Sneakpeekit
• Free Online Graph Paper
• Gridzzly
• Coolors
• Canva
• Colormind
• Adobe Color
• Designer News
• Codepen
• Dribbble
• Awwwards
• Episode 4

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/7

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UIT 6: In this week’s episode I talk with Chris Biscardi about the Jamstack, gatsbyJS and his own meta-framework called Toast, amongst many other interesting digressions :)

Overview

• Introduction
• JamStack
• Toast
• Party Corgi
• MDX Conf
• Wrap Questions

Introduction
Got into the industry via ActionScript, then moved over JS when Adobe killed it off. Worked at Docker, Dropbox and recently finished a contract with GatsbyJS.

Talk a bit about the Party Corgi Podcast, and the rainbow corgi logo (which is cute). Chris shares that he has nerves with his podcast too (after I apologies for a few nervous erm/ahhs etc). I’ve left these in unedited because the conversation took a nice direction.

What is the Jamstack
Jamstack and serverless are pretty much the same thing, and are both associated with Build vs Buy Paradigm i.e. if the technology is your core competency then build it, else buy it.

It’s basically the reduction in complexity associated with large devops pipelines i.e. you’re not running a kubernetes or large distributed infrastructure. Instead you’re basically shipping a zip file that’s then deployed on to Amazon S3 or a CDN, and you’re serving a bunch or static files. All the compute necessary to generate your site is done at build time.

A reasonable understanding of where the reduction in complexity ends up; is instead with the developer. One may have removed the need for a server to host a dynamic site with databases etc, but the same functionality has to be achieved at build time in a way that shouldn’t be too complex for the developer.

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/6

• Chris Biscardi
• ActionScript
• JAMStack
• Serverless computing
• Build vs Buy Paradigm
• Amazon S3
• Amazon Lambda
• What’s a CDN
• Sapper
• NextJS
• Create React App
• GatsbyJS
• VueJS
• VuePress
• Grunt
• Gulp
• Brunch
• Joel Hooks
• SWC
• ES Build
• Rust
• WASM
• Neon
• Cloudinary
• Styled Components
• Emotion
• HMR
• ...

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/6

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